Catherine Richards Prize
The Catherine Richards Prize is awarded for the best article published in Mathematics Today each year and the winners are usually invited to receive their certificates at an IMA event. Catherine Richards worked for the Institute from 1970 until her death in 1993. She was Executive Secretary for the period 1987 to 1993. The prize fund was created from donations made in her memory.
A second prize created to recognise young/early-career contributors has been run as a writing competition since 2013. This was rebranded the Graham Hoare Prize in 2018.
Each year, the Mathematics Today Editorial Board appoints a panel of three adjudicators for the prize. The panel members independently give each article a score between 1 and 5 (1 is the worst and 5 is the best) for Quality of Writing, Depth of Mathematics and General Interest. For a paper to be considered for the prize it must score at least 2 under each of these three headings. Once the scores have been consolidated, the paper with the highest score is the one recommended for the prize. If the three judges do not agree on the winner then the winner is agreed through discussion. The panel may decide not to award a prize.
Feature articles from the calendar year are considered for the prize. However, those written by current IMA Councillors and Mathematics Today Board Members are not considered, and from the 2019 competition onwards, authors who have won aren’t considered for the next three prizes.
Catherine Richards Prize winners
- 2023 Matthew Cotton and Brady Metherall – Settling Scores and Gambling on Goals
- 2022 Emma Fairbanks – Modelling Covid-19 Transmission at Universities
- 2021 Mark Pencovitch – What’s Knot to Love?
- 2020 Adrian Rice – Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920): The Centenary of a Remarkable Mathematician
- 2019 Mark McCartney – Fluids, Fluorescence and a Hat Full of Beetles
- 2018 Alan Champneys – Westward Ho! Musing on Mathematics and Mechanics – Permutation poetry and chaotic collaboration
- 2017 Alan Champneys – Westward Ho! Musing on Mathematics and Mechanics – Boardmasters
- 2016 Philip Pearce and Tom Shearer – Maths in Medicine
- 2015 David J.T. Sumpter – How to Model Honeybee Colonies
- 2014 Malcolm Savage – Beautiful Music – A Mathematical Fluke?
- 2013 Matt Keeling, Michael Tildesley, Thomas House and Leon Danon – The Mathematics of Vaccination
- 2012 Edmund Chadwick, Thurai Rahulan and Yu Wang – Reverse Swerve – A New Phenomenon in Football
- 2012 Christopher Hollings – The Case of Evgenii Sergeevich Lyapin*
- 2011 Ken TD Eames and Ellen Brooks-Pollock – Pigs didn’t Fly, but Swine Flu**
- 2010 Rose D Baker – The Problem of Obesity: can mathematics help?
- 2009 Paul Glendinning – Box Models of the Oceanic Conveyor Belt
- 2008 Paul Glendinning – Ballistic Penetration
- 2007 Michael Powell – A view of algorithms for optimization without derivatives
- 2007 Ahmer Wadee – Nonlinear Mathematics in Structural Engineering
- 2006 Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw – Constructing pandiagonal magic squares of arbitrarily large size
- 2005 David Percy – The Power of Bayes
- 2004 Joyce Aitchison – The Mathematics of Proportional Representation
- 2004 Ben Veith – Music of the Primes; a talk by Marcus du Sautoy*
- 2004 Matt Horsham – Fermat’s Last Theorem; a talk by Simon Singh*
- 2003 Terry Fairclough – Pensions by Dickens
- 2003 Paul Holland – Coupling Plankton Population Models to Hydrodynamical Studies
- 2002 Rose D Baker – Probability Paradoxes: an improbable journey to the End of the World
- 2001 Sir Michael Atiyah – Mathematics in the 20th Century
- 2000 Lloyd N Trefethen – Predictions for Scientific Computing Fifty Years from Now
- 1999 Kenneth Morgan, Oubay Hassan and Nigel Weatherill – Why Didn’t the Supersonic Car Fly?
*Awarded the Catherine Richards Young Writer Prize
**Awarded the Catherine Richards Young Writer Prize in addition to the Catherine Richards Prize